LTSP Cluster with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

When Lucid Lynx came out I downloaded the ISO and started playing with it on a VM. First impression is that it looks way different than previous versions, and very polished. While I was reading LTSP documentation and looking through the available packages for Lucid, I came across a package called LTSP-Cluster. This package has been in the works for some time now and it should be the way to go if you have a lot of thin clients in your organization.

The idea is that there is a root server that is used to give out DHCP and the image of the thin client. On the root server, you install also the load balancer and cluster control. Then you keep adding application servers that will be used by the thin clients to run their desktop on. What I did after much trial and error, I configured first the root server to be an LDAP client and NFS client for the /homes. That did not work, so I configured the application server to as LDAP client and NFS client. That seemed to do the trick.

I am attaching an image of the setup that I used. All this was done in VMs, so the root server, application server and thin client were installed and tested in VirtualBox in my iMac. When I roll out the hardware solution, I will post a guide of how I did it exactly.

The ubuntu guide (HowTo) is not complete and there are several steps missing. I will include how to configure Lucid as an LDAP client and NFS server as well.